TOTAL WASTE

Timothy Linh Bui's Powder Blue (D) was like watching an inflated and seriously pretentious student film. I didn't expect much from this direct-to-DVD indie, but I rented it solely for the reason that Jessica Biel picked this film as her first where she'd take her clothes off (she plays a stripping single mom with a cancer-stricken son). If you think she's hot, you'll like the scenes that she appears in; a coked-up mess of a floozie, she's a shambling pole-dancer who sometimes enjoys dripping hot candle wax all over her chest while preforming on stage. All of this crap is shot with a either a blue or red filter because Bui is oh-so-stylish. Puuleezzee. The cast includes Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta, Lisa Kudrow, Patrick Swayze, Kris Kristofferson (for a scene), and Sanaa Lathan (for a scene); all of them overact or just look confused. The narrative is Crash-esque; a bunch of people's lives collide in Los Angeles over the course of the week leading up to Christmas. The religious themes are overplayed, the plot lines are vigorously contrived, and the score is annoying. The only reason to rent this movie is to see Jessica show off her Biel's, and even then, Bui, the wuss that he is, doesn't even shoot it in a medium-close up (other dancers are shot in close up throughout the scenes in the strip club). I am making a big deal about this because it's slightly fraudulent to make a film about a stripper where you don't have the actress get appropriately naked. See The Wrestler for how it's done; Marisa Tomei knows what's up. Biel isn't much of an actress to my eyes (although I've heard excellent stuff about her performance in the recently released Easy Virtue.) But she's nice eye candy, so fans of her from her 7th Heaven days will probably have a mini-coronary. The film is crap, but has some scenes worthy of the old "fast-forward" option on your DVD remote.